Category: humor

25 random things about me

~ jamie ~ 8 Comments

this is a facebook meme that’s currently going around. since i can’t leave well enough alone, i modified it to be “24 true random things about me, and one lie”.

i’m a contrarian. so sue me.

anyway, i’m reposting it here, because i’m lazy and because it was fun to write:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

Jamie’s Modified Rule: There are 24 true random things about me, and one false one. Can you spot the lie?

1. My first home was in a holler in Kentucky. It was at the top of the holler, which is a good thing when no one has indoor plumbing. Our house was one of the few that had plumbing, though only the toilet was inside. The bathtub, due to space considerations, was on the front porch.

2. My first pet was a dachshund that I named President Nixon.

3. My grandmother was a habitue of Chicago speakeasies, where she gained her lifelong habit of drinking only shots of whiskey. With few women in the speakeasies, many men would buy you mixed drinks that were heavy on the alcohol, and she wanted to carefully control her intake.

4. I French-kissed Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

5. Thinking I was bisexual, I married a woman who later came out as a lesbian. After our divorce she remained one of my best friends. No harm, no foul.

6. My partner Kirk and I were married in the home of Hedwig, the Jane Street Theater, by a Unitarian minister, with the reception hosted by Mistress Formika of Wigstock fame.

7. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when my sixth grade girlfriend hit me over the head with a Pepsi bottle. I had two-timed her.

8. Until my recent break in employment and return to school, I had been continuously employed since age eight.

9. My high school nickname was “Flash”. For various reasons.

10. I have eaten: chitlins, cracklins, rattlesnake, squirrel, andouillette sausage (see: chitlins), tripe, kidneys, liver, octopus, eel, sea anemone, possum, and lots of Peter Luger steak. I have not yet eaten sweetbreads. I was also a vegetarian for ten years, and a vegan for five or so of those.

11. I once picked watermelons, for one day, for very little pay.

12. I got braces on my teeth as a high school graduation present.

13. When younger, I could put both of my feet behind my head and walk on my hands.

14. I advised a high school journalism staff that produced one of the nation’s first desktop-published yearbooks, and the editor of that yearbook got a job after high school making twice what I did as a teacher. I also advised the nation’s first CD-ROM yearbook.

15. I have Morton’s Toe.

16. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when I attempted to take a door off the hinges while standing on a chair. The door’s spring closer, contrary to what I thought, did have some spring remaining.

17. I have owned the domain name “queerspace.com” since 1998.

18. I have been in each of the 48 states of the continental U.S.

19. I shook hands with Bill Clinton.

20. My first car was a 1965 Rambler American 4-door sedan. I paid $200 for it, put nearly 75,000 more miles on it, and sold it for $275.

21. Until I moved to Reading, PA, each time I moved was to successively larger cities.

22. As a child, I was knocked unconscious when diving headfirst into the television. I thought Romper Room was a place I could get to that way.

23. I peed in the bathroom at CBGB’s.

24. I once had a burger and a beer with Anthony Bourdain.

25. I have a lovely one bedroom coop apartment in New York for sale.

your tax dollars at work

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via time: brent rinehart is running for reelection as a county commissioner in oklahoma county. that’s in oklahoma. oklahoma city, to be exact.

why should you care?

you shouldn’t, except that he’s distributing the funniest, most over-the-top campaign literature you can imagine. it’s a comic book he wrote himself.

but richie rich or archie it ain’t.

from the associated press article on the subject:

Some Oklahoma County voters can expect to receive comic books in the mail soon, but the subject matter will have a serious tone.

The 16-page publication prepared by Commissioner Brent Rinehart’s re-election campaign lampoons gays and criticizes Rinehart’s political opponents. It also features an angel who supports the embattled commissioner and Satan, who supports his critics.

“It’s more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2,” Rinehart told The Oklahoman, which obtained the comic on Wednesday.

Toga-wearing gays, political figures, trench coat-clad henchmen, concerned residents and Rinehart make up the rest of the comic’s characters.

In one sequence,
Satan says: “If I can get the kids to believe homosexuality is normal!”

The angel replies: “Hey Satan, not with Brent around you won’t!”

the comic book must be seen to be believed. it’s a must-read.

perhaps we should introduce mr. rinehart to larry craig or mark foley, two other crusaders on the evils of homosexuality.

hot water for dehydrated babies

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

the banality, bad planning, and hilarity of john mccain’s speech on tuesday has been discussed to death.

but i want to focus on one particular line that had kirk and me hooting with laughter.

and of course there’s a long hilarious discussion on digg.

hopefully by november this guy will, at a minimum, learn to read a teleprompter, a skill you think he would have acquired by now.

or, perhaps, i should hope that he won’t learn.

your creation museum report

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via daring fireball, a tour of the creation museum, from just the right perspective.

here’s a sample:

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

i had to stop reading, because i was at work and in danger of laughing so hard i’d disturb the nearby cubedwellers.

this one’s a classic.

sioux city sux, not gay

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from my yahoo! home page this morning:

City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport’s unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport’s new marketing campaign. The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport’s new slogan, “FLY SUX.”

make lemonade out of lemons, and all. were they given any other options?

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.

my god, how could you turn down “gay”? think of the glbt tourist dollars that could be coming your way. sioux city: the new p-town. key west of the extreme north.

you can’t make this stuff up if you try.

fake steve on the iphone, consumerism

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

day in and day out, fake steve jobs for my money has the funniest blog on the web. even if you aren’t an apple fan, it’s still worth a read. his takes on apple, technology, current events, and miscellany are consistently hilarious.

and often insightful as well.

as was the case with a recent post: 29 june 2007, the day the world changed. it’s set up as a fake message to the apple faithful, on the occasion of the release of the iphone. but here’s what he has to say about the thousands of people lined up for hours, or days, for their iphone:

It’s about saying, Look, I realize there’s something bad happening in Darfur, and there’s some kind of AIDS epidemic in Africa, and there’s some crazies who want to blow us all up, and there’s a war in Iraq where thousands of people are dying for no reason — and yes, those things are important, and someday we may take to the streets to say something about them, if we can think of anything to say about them, but for now we Americans take to the streets for this cause.

i can’t recall reading a better summary of the times in which we currently live.

must be something in the dirty water

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

oh, boston. i’m glad you aren’t my home. the home of public officials so stupid that they can’t tell the difference between a lite-brite and a terrorist bomb device.

basically, it was guerilla marketing in a couple of dozen cities over the past few weeks. none of the other cities were idiotic enough to think that al-qaeda was disguising their next attack on america as mooninites from aqua teen hunger force.

and so the great city of boston arrests the terrorists, i mean, the guerilla posting guys, who then give a press conference the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the beatles came to america. from cnn:

Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were released on $2,500 bail, said Mike Rich, their attorney. The next pre-trial hearing is scheduled for March 7.

Both men were cooperative with authorities, and neither has a previous criminal record in Massachusetts, Grossman said.

In a news conference, Rich told reporters he had advised his clients not to discuss the incident. Stevens and Berdovsky took the podium and said they were taking questions only about haircuts in the 1970s.

When a reporter accused them of not taking the situation seriously, Stevens responded, “We’re taking it very seriously.” Asked another question about the case, Stevens reiterated they were answering questions only about hair and accused the reporter of not taking him and Berdovsky seriously.

Reporters did not relent and as they continued, Berdovsky disregarded their queries, saying, “That’s not a hair question. I’m sorry.”

now that’s some classic stuff. john lennon would be proud.

update: here’s the video

today is “reveal your blog crush” day

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

at least according to this website, it is.

from the site:

So, I’ve been asked what technically IS a Blog Crush? It’d likely include some, if not all, of the following:
A) You can’t wait to read what they post next.
B) You want to be friends with them.
C) You think they are the cat’s meow. Meow!
D) You might find them attractive- physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, whatever floats your boat.
E) If you met them in person, blushing might occur.

i guess that, in that case, my blog crush is fake steve jobs. i think that counts. even though he’s fake, someone writes it. so i guess technically i have a crush on the real author of “fake steve jobs”. except not really. i have a crush on the fake persona of the real person.

this is just too complicated.

sing it, emily dickinson

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

you can sing all of emily dickinson’s poems to the tune of the theme from “gilligan’s island”. did you know that?

my former students do. most of them were forced to hear me sing “because i could not stop for death” or some such thing.

you can also sing her poems to the tune of “the yellow rose of texas”.

and now i learn, thanks to a comment on a gawker story, that you can also sing emily dickinson songs to the tune of “the battle hymn of the republic”.

aren’t the internets a wonderful place? how did we ever get along without them? remember, knowledge is power, grasshopper.

denise ousley, my former student who clued me into the “gilligan’s island” tidbit originally, would be thrilled at this news.

the continuing adventures of the fake steve jobs

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

for whatever reason, my favorite new blog (which i’ve written about before), is down and out.

the fake steve jobs assures us that he will return, but in the meantime if you missed out on the fun, you can look at the google cache of the old site.

the fake steve says about all this:

Dudes, I had no idea this blog was getting read so widely. I’m being held in captivity during the WWDC — scary story of rendition etc., which will be my firt new post. Anyway, I will relaunch soon, not sure where yet. Will keep you friggin informed. Like, with a post here or whatever. And FYI this is NOT an Apple publicity stunt. You really don’t think they have that much sense of humor, do you?
Cheers–
Fake Steve.

of course, he gets even more publicity now, because everyone puts on their tinfoil hats and starts spouting conspiracy theories involving apple legal.

whatever. come back soon, fake steve jobs.

and on a side note, i’ll be camping in the deep dark woods for the rest of the week–ricketts glen, in pennsylvania. and will therefore not be blogging until next monday at least.

i know you are crushed.

the blog i wish i wrote

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

and the blog i wish i’d thought of.

it’s a fake (i’m assuming it’s fake, anyway) blog written by someone who purports to be steve jobs of apple, called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2.

subtitled: “Dude, I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it?”

whoever writes this thing is a genius. it’s laugh-out-loud funny, especially if you know a bit about apple and its history. even if you don’t, it’s still hysterical. and the author has the point-of-view down completely and consistently.

best comedy writing i’ve read in ages. but maybe i’m biased.

quick followups

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

earlier i wrote about a guy who thought an onion article on abortion was real, and wrote a scathing blog about it.

he’s interviewed on salon. it’s a great read.

also, i wrote a couple of days ago about the idiocy of the government’s terrorist target list. turns out that, as a further example of the nuttiness, times square is not on the government’s list of targets. read that in this week’s time magazine.

amazing.

now i’m just waiting for someone to pick up on the india/pakistan story. i have a feeling that, although this is being ignored by the media, it might still pop up to haunt us.

i hope i don’t have to follow up on that one.